[Sunspots] The silverware edition

“Although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.”

“The responses ranged far and wide: Military metaphors popped up occasionally, with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War rearing its age-old head. But books about biology were also surprisingly prevalent, not only for their insight into how business environments imitate the natural world but also, several executives said, because understanding biology helped them appreciate the concept of randomness.”

“Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful, offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm. (It should be noted that he doesn’t limit “sketches” to pen on paper—a sketch might be digital or three-dimensional.) The value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions…Sketching is less expensive than prototyping, and far less expensive than trying to fix problems late in the development cycle.”

“The availability of Ajax technology is causing some developers to diverge from the native look and feel of the web in favor of a user interface style I call ‘desktop app in a web browser’...When you build a ‘desktop in the web browser’-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption. The fact that you can create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you should; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.” [via OR]

“If you snoop around my house, you’ll notice that there’s a silverware drawer that’s rather tidy and a junk drawer that’s not. It’s much easier to find a spoon than a battery. There’s a reason for that: my family and I look for spoons several times a day, but for batteries much less often. Things you use often should be easy to find. Things you do often should be easy to do. Properties like this, which Gabriel collectively calls “habitability,” can go against software principles.”

“The designs are created through a process called lawn striping…Many professional groundskeepers use old-fashioned reel mowers to cut a stadium’s grass. Attached just behind the blades of the mower is a lawn roller that bends the grass down…Whatever pattern you make is revealed by the light shining off of the bent grass.”

“The Internet Radio Equality Act (H.R. 2060) now has over 80 Congressional co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. Your calls and emails are making a difference. This bill does provide reasonable royalties for artists and their labels. We still need more co-sponsors and can only do it with your help. Support this legislation, act now!”

“It’s similar to the star rating you’ve seen on other sites, but reveals so much more. For example, when you see a rating of two-and-a-half starsshould you conclude the product is… average? Not really…In fact, products with sharply divided reviews are often the most interesting products — they are anything but vanilla. The so-called ‘wisdom of crowds’ is as much about disagreement as it is about agreement. A world of two-and-a-half stars would be a pretty boring place.”

“Mr. Sykes, who has built 80 of these homes, says that he was inspired by the way the earth’s own atmosphere keeps the planet at a relatively constant comfortable temperature despite the frigidity of space. It occurred to him that a house could have its own atmosphere, which might work the same way. As a side benefit, he says, one Enertia house has an environmental impact akin to taking 50 cars off the road.”

Sounds about as accurate as BG ranting about how Macs are attacked every single day. I would have thought that Windows XP is still used a lot more than Vista and there’s bound to be some embedded software out there that’s used a lot more than either of them.

Mike

The end interview seems like less of what BillG thinks of the Apple ad and really what he thinks about Bob Garfield.

Bob’s second to last question was pretty bizarre . . . he starts off saying Bono’s Red campaign has cost more than it has raised, then instead of asking Bill a question relating directly to the Red campaign or the story, he asks Bill what he thinks about branded charity in general. Like Red’s supposed failure (the Advertising Age story is the only one I’ve seen so far one the issue, searching Google News brings up nada) means branded charities aren’t worth it. Bill’s response seems reasonable; he questions the numbers Bob mentioned in the article, and says that to call any charity that saves lives unsuccessful is pretty cynical.

As far as the Apple ad is concern, what did Bob expect Bill to say? One utterance on the Apple ads from him and it’ll be picked up by every news and media organization in the world in a matter of hours. Bill would have just given one of his main competitors free world-wide advertising, Bob was being a complete douche in asking that question.

Except for the end the interview was pretty good, Bill’s thoughts on the future of advertising were pretty interesting, especially the part were he said that the technology will improve to make it just as easy to be on 1,000 sources of entertainment as easy as it is to be on a few large sources. Too bad the interview was marred by Bob Garfield’s fumbling and odd metaphors (“the cobbler’s children going barefoot?”).

Dan Evans

Which is an article mentioned in a the “keyless” edition of sunspots about a month ago. Just pointing this out because there may be many people who didn’t read that Bret Victor article in its entirety, not saying that there’s plagiarism of an idea occurring here.